About 17 years ago (2000) when there was a race against time for the release of the Mozilla web browser, one of the internal programmers forming part of the development team uttered some words which still ring true today, those being that basically if anyone is looking at getting some formal qualification or any sort of training for a possible career in this day and age, they should probably look towards the tech sector. He was specifically speaking about programming, but in actual fact there are so many different career opportunities in technology that just about anyone could find something which suits them just right.
Formalising your education
Look, it’s definitely true that with the many free resources available online one can go all the way and learn something like programming by themselves, for free. It isn’t all “free” in the truest sense of the word though as there’s always a price to pay, even though the free users themselves don’t really know what form that price comes in. Basically if you’re a free user of a platform, you are the product and what your eyes tell you you’re seeing are commodities sold to advertisers.
If you’re on the other side of the fence, this is just one of the many ways through which you can earn an income from your tech-based skills, which in this instance would include the likes of web development, IT and even computer science.
So anyway, the importance of formalising your education in these mentioned tech-based fields resides in the fact that you’ll just have more opportunities that way, even if your ultimate plan is to go it your own route and perhaps work as a freelance web designer, an IT expert with your own IT firm or consultancy, etc. At some point in time setting yourself apart from the many other skilled tech-sector opportunity-seekers will come down to a matter of having gone through a formal qualification process.
Fortunately that can also be done online, with no distracting adverts to have to contend with and with a structured approach to a learning outcomes that focuses on what is important in the market at present. Resources such as courses.com.au will equip the aspirant web developer, IT professional or computer scientist with the necessary skills to not only compete in the job market, but also to perhaps create solutions which they can deploy commercially and earn some good money through licensing. Other online resources include the likes of MIT, Lynda, EDX.
Integration and collaboration
The beauty of pursuing a career in technology is that you get together with many other like-minded individuals, even if they’re in a different field within the tech sector, and all work on some projects which integrate the various different aspects. You could be a server-side web applications developer for instance and collaborate and work with a graphics designer, a project manager, a voiceover artist or any other tech-sector professional remotely, with the final project coming together to form something quite special.
